The present invention relates generally to a hearing aid, and more particularly to a hearing aid for selectively providing sound to a user.
Hearing impairment or loss is a problem suffered by many people. Hearing problems may be congenital or may be due to injury or disease, exposure to damaging sound levels, aging, etc.
A common approach to hearing problems is the use of a hearing aid. Hearing aids mechanically pick up sound, convert it into an electronic signal, amplify the signal, and convert it back to sound which is applied to the ear of the user. In this manner, a higher sound level is provided directly into the ear canal of a user of the hearing aid. The user therefore can partially mitigate hearing problems.
A drawback of prior art hearing aids is that they not only pick up and amplify desired sounds, but they also pick up and amplify noise. Noise is almost always present, whether in the foreground or background. If the noise is strong enough, it can interfere with or drown out the desired sound. As a result, prior art hearing aids in some situations provide too much amplified noise to the user. Unfortunately, another drawback of a prior art hearing aid is that it continuously provides sound to the user, and cannot discriminate between desired sound and undesired sound. The prior art hearing aid does not give the user any guidance between background noise and speech. The user therefore must differentiate between noise and speech. In the prior art, the user must typically watch the lip movement of a speaker in order to determine when to listen to the output of the hearing aid and when to ignore the output.
Therefore, there remains a need in the art for improvements in hearing aids.
A hearing aid comprises an image sensing device, a sound input transducer, a sound output transducer, and a processor. The image sensing device detects an image from a selected region of a user of the hearing aid while the sound input transducer receives sound and produces an audio signal representative of the sound. The sound output transducer receives the audio signal and converts the audio signal to a sound wave that is provided to the user. The processor receives the image, analyzes the image to determine an existence of human-generated sound, and provides the audio signal from the sound input transducer to the sound output transducer when human-generated sound is detected. The audio signal is provided at a first level when human-generated sound is detected and is provided at a second level in an absence of human-generated sound.